Spain is heading towards a duopoly that makes access to housing difficult

The failed merger between BBVA and Sabadell has intensified concerns about the declining number of banks and their growing size. Since the 2008 crisis, the Spanish financial system has experienced a significant reduction, going from 55 entities in 2009 to the current 10.

The first wave of mergers between weaker banks, along with the disappearance of some, took place in 2014, leaving a financial structure of 14 entities. Later, during the pandemic, more important mergers emerged, such as the union of CaixaBank and Bankia or the acquisition of Liberbank by Unicaja Banco. These operations, along with other smaller ones, reduced the number of entities in the financial market to the current ten.

A key aspect in any merger is to achieve cost savings, which often means cutting staff and closing branches. Since the beginning of this process, the closure of offices has led to a -61.2% reduction (-28,000 offices), and it is estimated that close to 100,000 jobs have been lost, with a 14% of those positions of work destroyed in the last four years.

Other sectors, such as real estate, have expressed concern about the possible reduction in credit after the failure of the merger between BBVA and Sabadell. Since 2018, banks have shown a tendency to reduce financing for construction and real estate developmentdecreasing from more than 17,000 million euros in 2022 to just over 16,000 million in 2023 (a variation of -20.4%).

This scenario aggravates the housing access problem in Spain, which since the real estate bubble crisis in 2008 has deeply affected the market. According to him Bank of Spainhousing construction levels have not reached previous values ​​again, representing only 10% of these levels.

Furthermore, the president of the CSCAE, Marta Vall-llosera, highlighted that “The 2008 financial crisis caused such a significant drop in construction that, even with the arrival of the pandemic, it had not yet fully recovered. Currently, in Spain only two homes per year for every 1,000 inhabitantswhile 40 years ago the figure was three times higher.